1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medicine management system and method that capture and analyze an image of an individual medicine using the medicine image capturing device to calculate and manage medicine pattern information, thereby improving efficiency in management of individual medicine information and determining whether a compound medicine is abnormal.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, medicines have been diversified, and the amount of the medicines has been vastly increased. As a result, it is necessary to provide a system that is capable of managing medicine information in a batch manner in places where various kinds of medicines are managed, such as large-scale pharmacies and dispensaries of hospitals.
However, hospitals and pharmacies have different medicine management codes. In addition, nations have different medicine management codes. That is, medicine retrieval criteria are not standardized. As a result, it is difficult to efficiently manage medicine information.
Also, a large number of human resources are needed to determine whether a medicine compounding state is normal per packaged medicine in hospitals and pharmacies where a large amount of compound medicines is managed. Furthermore, such determination needs a long test time.
Also, it is not possible to easily determine errors of medicines having identical or similar color or size, and therefore, defects of compound medicines may lower effects of patient treatment. In addition, defects of compound medicines may have a bad effect on patient health.
For these reasons, various kinds of medicine information management devices that are capable of capturing and analyzing medicine images to calculate medicine pattern information have been developed. Also, devices that are operatively connected to the medicine information management devices for automatically testing compound medicines have been developed.
It is possible for each of the automatic compound medicine testing devices to capture images of the compound medicines and compare the captured compound medicine images with medicine image information stored in each of the medicine information management devices to determine whether the captured compound medicine images coincide with the medicine image information stored in each of the medicine information management devices.
At the time of operative connection between each medicine information management device and each compound medicine testing device, however, camera setting values based on image capturing may not be synchronized, with the result that incongruity errors on the same medicine information may frequently occur during testing.
Also, persons in charge who manage the medicine information management devices and the compound medicine testing devices may differently set the camera setting values, with the result that the camera setting values may be different between the medicine information management devices and the compound medicine testing devices, thereby lowering efficiency of medicine information management.
Also, in each of the conventional compound medicine testing devices, an image capturing camera is exposed to the outside, with the result that quality of medicine images is greatly affected by the external environment.